Public Transport/BMTC

As a loyal patron of BTS/BMTC for many decades (before and after retirement) I would like to give a few suggestions.

It is well known that the majority of the travelling public of Bangalore (60%-70%) use BMTC for their daily commuting. The remaining 30%-40% comprise private transport (2/3/4 wheelers) and also pedestrians who cannot afford to use such transports.

The Traffic/Transport systems existing/ envisaged are not giving due importance to the majority of the users, but are focusing only to the minority private transport vehicle users as they are more vociferous and influential.

This lopsided policy of the Traffic and Transport departments is the root cause of the many ills and woes of the citizens.

The policies should be revised to focus on the requirements, convenience and comforts of the majority Public Transport users.

The one-way road systems being implemented have put the Bus commuters to severe hardships as they are denied access to 50% of the destinations which exist on such one-ways as these cannot be accessed from the reverse direction and the reverse routes/ bus stops are nowhere near their original bus stops which have been eliminated (e.g. – One cannot access Cash Pharmacy from Indiranagar).

BMTC have been introducing many new routes and new types of buses like Volvo, Suvarna etc. without consulting the actual users (commuters) as there are no Commuter Forums (which existed some years back).

This is resulting in such new routes being under-utilised resulting in heavy losses to BMTC which have to be passed on to the users of regular buses by keeping the fares highest in the country. (The bus fares in neighbouring Cities like Chennai are only one third the Bangalore fares- e.g. It is Rs. 5/ only for 16 KM.).

Due to monopoly of BMTC they run the buses in the routes which they think are needed as none of the decision makers ever have first hand experience of travel by their own buses regularly.

To make the BMTC officials have the taste of their services, it should be made mandatory for them to use only their BMTC services for all official and private requirements and all official cars etc. provided should be withdrawn. In exceptional cases cars may be allowed if valid reasons are given as to why they cannot use the numerous types of ordinary and luxury buses of their own services. This will open their eyes to the practical difficulties of the commuters who are exhorted to use Public Transport discarding their private vehicles.

Whatever lacunae are found by such officials should be reported and speedy actions taken to set them right.

Commuter Forums (not Resident Associations, as not all of their members travel by Public Transport) should be formed/revived to get feed backs at regular intervals.

Wherever the large BMTC buses cannot reach, MINI bus services should be introduced to cover every nook and corner of the city. (Such services by both Public sector and private sector in neighbouring states like Tamilnadu are benefitting the public immensely providing frequent services at very economical fares without any subsidy).

If the BMTC do not consider it feasible to run such MINI bus services, the Govt. should ask private operators to run them. This will provide healthy competition to BMTC and improve their efficiency, thereby benefitting the commuters in more ways than one.

Many other problems and solutions are being already discussed in this forum. I am not repeating them here.

With reference to Item 6, please refer browse www.kaaranji.com for a story on how BMTC is investing in misadventure capital investment in Volvs/Vajras/HoHo/ Big10 services that have been incurring regular losses for the past 3 years and to boot it, many such orders for such white elephants costing over Rs.75 lakhs each are under way. Also please see another post: Stratified BMTC services - making profits with deficient services'.

With reference to item 13 of your post, introduction of more number of vehicles either BMTC or private cannot be the anathema for our miseries because there are no roads to ply such increased number of vehicles. They make our life more miserable. What is needed is plans for scientific optimum utilisation of road infrastructure to create faster movement of vehicles. And also, curtail registration of new vehicles by people who own one vehicle already. In Bengaluru many families have 2/3 two wheelers and the "haves" have more than two cars parked on pedestrian pathways in front of their houses.

Dear Mr. Vasanth,
Introduction of Mini buses to cater to areas unapproachable by larger buses will help in decongesting the smaller roads by weaning away the users of two/three/4 wheelers.
The available road space will utilised more effectively.
K.V.Pathy

Big 10 and Kendriya Saarige are ideal examples (was it ABIDe who did it - people who ate away Rs.34 lakhs on one meeting that did not include any commuters?). Also wonder what was deal about buying so many volvo/suvarna/marco polo buses. When powerfull Depot managers get more money for maintaining these fat cows so more the chance of siphoning, wonder what the scene is higher up.

Great idea - BMTC higher ups should travel in black board and red board buses to understand regular commuter's problems. This will also fix the cleanliness in short term. Also top government officials should start using regular buses. Nice place for public grievance solutions!!

And feedback should only be accepted from regular commuters, not from noisy-guilt covering private vehicle praja's (the vociferous and influential lot). I'm not saying they should not be given Volvo AC buses, etc but surely not at the cost of slowly decreasing the number of regular bus users. Lot of them would switch to 2-wheelers in such case.

Being an optimist, I hope some tough decisions could be made. Will be keen to see how the above 13 points will be pruned and carried forward to the powerful.

... we should include items 8, 9 & 10 from this post by PathyKV. Ask how many trips employees in 'decision making' capacity took on BMTC buses in the last two weeks. And if BMTC got any feedback from such trips.

We should also ask if BMTC would be willing to mandate such a periodic survey (complete with feedback) of their services by their own decision makers.

It is good that BMTC is planning to start feeder services to enable passengersv to reach the Metro stations and hop on to the trains. (TOI- 25th May).

They should start this service immediately to the City Railway station as the passengers are suffering great hardship due to the ill-designed sub way between the Bus station and Railway station which is impossible to negotiate by senior citizens, women & children carrying baggage and are now forced to engage Autos (though unaffordable) contributing to the traffic congestion and pollution

Quoting from the article above: The bus stop is built only for a crowd of 20-30 commuters. But I have seen around 200-300 people waiting for buses

This points to a reach and/or routing problem. Why is this stop collecting so many passengers? Could they be split up to different stops in the same locality based on the direction of the buses they take? The more the crowd, the more time it will take to load unload pax and buses will begin to back up behind each other when frequencies are high.

t he passengers are suffering great hardship due to the ill-designed sub way between the Bus station and Railway station which is impossible to negotiate by senior citizens, women & children carrying baggage

All you need is ramp and escalators to solve this. I have also suggested in an earlier thread on railways to extend this subway and connect it to the platform subway directly with one more exit at the entrance of the station. The subway can have platform ticket vending machines embedded in the walls like the hole-in-the wall ATMs in the rest of the world.

It is good that BMTC is planning to start feeder services to enable passengersv to reach theMetrostations and hop on to the trains. (TOI- 25th May). They should start this service immediately to the City Railway station as the passengers are suffering great hardship due to the ill-designed sub way between the Bus station and Railway station which is impossible to negotiate by senior citizens, women & children carrying baggage and are now forced to engage Autos (though unaffordable) contributing to the traffic congestion and pollution.

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